Application of the Msplit Estimation Method in the Detection and Dimensioning of the Displacement of Adjacent Planes

Building constructions are exposed to various forces and natural phenomena. Some of them are sudden and violent, e.g., an earthquake or heavy rains, causing a displacement of the ground. Other phenomena affect objects on a longer-term, e.g., vibrations caused by daily road traffic. Sometimes, building structures may have defects due to incorrect construction. In any case, if an engineering object shows changes in the relation to its correct geometry or position, deformation and displacement measurements are required. Engineering objects are also monitored during their construction. Nowadays, it is important to perform measurements quickly and with high accuracy. The use of a Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS) allows for the required measurement speed and accuracy. This measurement technology allows a large dataset, which can be arbitrarily elaborated, to be obtained. The structure of building objects can include vertices, lines, planes, and other shapes and can be described using mathematical functions. This allows data processing to be automated. In this article, we present the Msplit method as an effective approach to the processing of data obtained as a result of TLS measurements. The proposed approach is new because until now, the Msplit estimation method has not been used to detect adjacent planes in one-point cloud obtained from TLS. The Msplit estimation method allows a functional model to be split into two or more competitive models and thus two or more entities in a point cloud to be estimated simultaneously. Four different objects measured using TLS are presented: two objects representing vertical displacements and two objects representing horizontal displacements. The test results and analysis confirm that the Msplit estimation method can be successfully applied in the detection of adjacent planes.